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Research In Service to the Land

Figure 5. A photograph made in 1890, when naturalist Lewis Lindsay Dyche was mounting the skin of the horse called Comanche, showing what is inside it.

Last year, organizers for the 2016 meeting of the American Indigenous Research Association asked me to share my experience in science as a Native woman. As I started preparing the paper, which I delivered at the end of last month, I asked myself: “What do I wish I had known, going in, that could have prepared me for the hidden obstacles that face a Native person in science research?”

I decided it’s not the “how-to” of the concrete ways I applied Indigenous research methods to studies of plesiosaur and dinosaur locomotion, sabertooth jaw mechanics, and evolutionary theory. It wasn’t actually hard to apply Indigenous ways of knowing and learning to my work. Like many Indigenous people, I do it in my regular life. So of course I do it when I teach, and of course it’s how I approach my research. It’s second nature. I think all you have to do is open yourself up to it and it happens.

What I wish I had understood is how deeply Western science was going to resist my methods and how relentlessly it would try to change them. And I wish I’d known why. Because this is the key to realizing you can’t fix the problem. What looks like a stone you can dislodge with a bit of effort when you trip over it is actually the visible tip of a buried mountain.

You can read more about my thoughts and experiences in science as a Native woman in the published version of this presentation, “In Service to the Land: Indigenous Research Methods in the Natural Sciences,” which is now online in full format.